This is the blog of Brian Long, Windows, Mac & mobile trainer, trouble-shooter and consultant.

Friday, 20 September 2013

Android resources

For those Pascal programmers looking at building Android applications, be it with Delphi XE5 or with Oxygene for Java (I work with both!), here are a few Android-related resources that may come in useful:

Google’s Android Device Manager – if you mislay your Android device this allows you to locate it on a map (if it’s got a data/WiFi connection) and also ring it (presumably if it’s a telephone – I haven’t checked whether this option does anything on a tablet). Clearly this is similar to Apple’s Find My iPhone functionality.[Update: Jim confirms that tablets will happily ring too]

Using remote Android emulators – because Android emulators emulate the device CPU they can be hideously slow, and basically unusable in a VM. If your dev tool runs in a VM then it can be useful to communicate to an Android emulator (technically called an Android Virtual Device or AVD) either on the host machine or another machine on your network. This is a useful technique entirely independent of your chosen development tool as it revolves around how your local adb.exe communicates with the emulator. This post by Jim McKeeth runs through how to set this up using SSH. You can also find a write-up in the Delphi online documentation.

If you are using Oxygene for your Android development you may want to look at setting up your AVD to use an x86 CPU, potentially taking advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology via Intel HAXM (Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager) to provide VM acceleration. Delphi developers cannot take advantage of this because Delphi targets the ARMv7 CPU.

App testing across many devices. The Android emulator has long been held up as pretty much the only way of testing your app across the range of form factors that different devices can offer. Now it’s not the only option though, as Apkudo for Developers offers developers a free online app-testing platform where your app will be tested on over 260 different Android devices. Just upload your app to the queue and a report will be sent back when the tests have been run.

Since Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich release introduced the Roboto font as the default, you may want a copy to install on your machines. You can download it from the link in the blue box here (or this is the direct d/l link).

For anyone who does presenting it can be very useful to have a means of showing on your computer screen what your device is doing. There are various VNC-based solutions for this out there, but Jim McKeeth has built a simple solution using repeated screen-captures called Android Screen View. You can download the source code for it here or pull down a build here.

The Android dashboards show you the percentage of devices sharing various characteristics as obtained from the Google Play store. All the devices in question will be running Android 2.2 (FroYo) and above. This device breakdown can be useful to decide what OS and form factor to ensure you support.On the dashboards you can see the breakdown of:

Android OS versions

Screen sizes and densities

OpenGL version

If you have a nose that needs to be poked inside everything, consider pulling down the Android source code. Information on how is available here.